See

discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262801397

High Price: Book Review

Technical Report June 2014

CITATIONS READS

0 1,274

5 authors, including:

Mwizenge Sani Tembo

Bridgewater College
27 PUBLICATIONS 8 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Mwizenge Sani Tembo on 03 June 2014.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 High Price: Book Review
By
Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D
Professor of Sociology
Dr. Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist Journey of Self-Discovery that Challenges
Everything You Know About Drugs and Society, New York: Harper Collins, 2013, pp.
340, $26.99, Hardcover.
Introduction
Whether you consider yourself an ordinary reader, a well-read citizen of the global world,
a highly educated individual who is a Ph. D. holder in the specialized reified air of natural
or social sciences in the highest echelons of academia, there is no book that you will read
that may result into driving a seismic shift in existing epistemologies and paradigms. This
is not mere hyperbole to sweeten the selling of a book. Reading this book gave me the
same feeling I had when I first read The Death of White Sociology (1973) by Joyce
Ladner thirty-seven years ago when I was a young graduate student. It was the realization
that what had been published in respectable academic literature up to the 1920s in
America and the Western world as objective scientific studies that reinforced deeply
racist foundations of Western culture was actually debunked by Ladner as being deeply
flawed. The basic foundations of the racist views have not been eliminated since the
publishing of that book by Joyce Ladner.
Is this also about to happen to Dr. Carl Harts work? Are most readers going to dismiss
the book and therefore its powerful new ideas as mere usual grievance ideology to make
whites feel guilty about racism and African-Americans and so-called minorities to feel
righteous?
High Price and Color Blind Society
Dr. Carl Harts High Price: A Neuroscientist Journey of Self-Discovery that Challenges
Everything You Know About Drugs and Society, is a story of the most unlikely African
American man to become a neuroscientist. He grew up in poverty in a violent dislocated
family in the toughest neighborhoods of Miami. But he fought too many odds to become
someone least likely to be so: a neuroscientist and tenured Assistant Professor at the
prestigious Ivy league Columbia University. So this is a story of an individual rising from
rugs to riches, so what? There are perhaps thousands in if not millions of Americans who
beat various types of odds and obstacles to achieve the highest positions in the
professions they have decided to pursue. What is different about Dr. Carl Harts ideas,
experiences, and biography?
It is very easy, in the contemporary atmosphere of political
correctness of advocating a color blind society, to overlook the
biggest elephant in the room that is right on the front cover of the
book. Dr. Carl Hart is not just obviously black or African-American
but he is wearing a suit and dreg locks. How many African-
Americans who wear dreg locks are neuroscientists? Will the fact of
his looks lead the potential readers to dismiss his book and therefore
profound ideas? Will the readers wrongly judge the book by its
cover? As my scientific career moved forward, the number of black peers around me
dwindled until frequently I was the only black person in the room. When I got my Ph. D.
in 1996, in fact, I was the only black man in America to receive a doctorate in
neuroscience that year. (Hart, 2013: p. 221) If my entire argument was about his looks
and his low social racial status in our present society, I would not waste my time writing
this raving review.
Dr. Carl Hart discusses and exposes the massive misleading hysteria in American society
since the early 1900s that wrongly portrayed African Americans as smoking marijuana
and becoming high and crazed. While in this drug-induced craze, they would go on
violent rampage endangering peaceful white communities especially white women.
Except all of these assumptions were never true although they led to American society
making marijuana illegal and inflicting stiff punishments on those who broke the law
according to Dr. Hart. The actual impact of the marijuana as a drug was never really
addressed or scientifically investigated rationally.
Crack Cocaine Hysteria
Dr. Hart fast forwards to the white powder and crack cocaine hysteria of the 1980s. The
media, law makers, and society portrayed the black inner city crack cocaine user as an
irrational addict, violent, crazy, and desperate to do anything to get a fix. The
consequences were broken black families, high unemployment, rise in violent crimes, and
dislocation of the inner city black neighborhoods. Harsh laws were passed against
cocaine use that had the unintended consequences of incarceration for longer terms of
large black male population while whites who perhaps used even more cocaine were
hardly imprisoned. Dr. Hart debunks these myths and argues using his own research in
neuroscience and his own abuse of drugs earlier in his youth that, most, if not all the
assumptions we make about drugs, addictions, and their impact on African American
neighborhoods in the inner city may be wrong and based on hysteria. He says this might
be the case even among the highly acclaimed research by prestigious neuroscience
researchers who publish their articles in exclusive highly peer reviewed journal
publications. This reviewer asks what good is a highly peer reviewed published research
article if the entire foundation and assumptions that undergird the research might he
seriously flawed?
It became increasingly clear to me how prejudices about drug use and our punitive
policies toward users themselves made people who take drugs seem less human and less
rational. Drug users behavior was always first ascribed to drugs rather than considered in
light of other, equally prominent factors in the social world, like drug laws. (Hart, 2013:
p. 260)
Challenging the Existing Paradigms
One of the most profound claims that Dr. Hart makes which will resonate and likely
suddenly make so much logical sense to the reader is that any drugs that are introduced
among any people, and especially African-American inner city neighborhoods, are done
in the context of preexisting social pathology: unemployment, crime, poverty, violence,
dislocated families, social isolation, poor schools and education, despair, and
hopelessness. People in these circumstances may use drugs not because the drugs
themselves cause the social pathology but it may be the other way round. People will use
 illicit drugs not because of the intrinsic and compelling neurological impact of drugs on
the brain, but because individuals who live in and are experiencing debilitating social
pathology may find drugs attractive to alleviate their anxiety, hopelessness, social
isolation, and alienation. If this assertion by Dr. Hart does not challenge and question our
entire epistemology and paradigm about drugs and society, I dont know what will. The
entire book provides compelling evidence in support of his assertions.
Inspirational
High price will perhaps be inspirational to many readers. The title refers to the high
personal social price the author had to pay to achieve this very highly exceptional goal
for an African American. He became alienated form his own childhood family
community. But the book also raises many questions as it also confirms many
uncomfortable realities of American if not Western society. The reviewer finds it
frustrating that 50 years after the Civil Right Act, Dr. Carl Hart and perhaps millions of
African Americans still live troubled lives of poor education, poverty, and rampant racial
discrimination and segregation. Large segments of this population may not still be part of
the American mainstream and may feel alienated.
The reviewer finds the book to be so highly interdisciplinary that he recommends it for
all researchers, scholars and especially teachers of social and natural sciences. If you just
read or see the cover of this book and dismiss it as it deals with African-American and
minority marginal issues, you will be making a grave academic mistake. The beauty and
strength of this book is that you can extrapolate and apply the ideas to many scientific,
social ideas, perspectives and problems. At the minimum after reading the book you just
become a more educated and better informed person. What would be its extraordinary
impact is if the existing academic epistemologies and paradigms were radically
transformed.

View publication stats